Whig History and the Baptists

Just a little while back we posted Linford Fisher's review of John Barry's new biography of Roger Williams, one of the best reviews we've ever posted here IMHO. Fisher appreciated the narrative quality of Barry's book, while questioning some of the "Whig history" (my term, not Lin's) assumptions that went into the presentation of Williams in that book. It's in that spirit I guest post this contribution from Curtis Freeman, Research Professor of Theology at Duke University Divinity School. Freeman is an authority on early Baptist history, and in the below takes aim at some cherished assumptions that Baptist historians have brought to their work. I might add that many of us have contributed to a new volume which similarly complicates (we hope) Baptist history: Through a Glass Darkly: Contested Notions of Baptist Identity (University of Alabama Press), edited by Keith Harper. More on that volume soon.

Whig
History and the Baptists
by Curtis Freeman

While attending a recent conference, I struck up a
conversation with one of the participants, John Coffey, a leading historian of
the Stuart period of English history in which the Baptists emerged. “So,” he asked, “Why is it that you Americans seem bent on seeing the history of the
early English Baptists as so Whiggish?” Offering what I thought was a
perfectly good explanation, I replied, “Because
we’re Americans.” With a wry smile, he shot back a reply that dripped with
irony: “True, but the early Baptists
weren’t.
When I got back home from the conference I
immediately began reading Coffey’s book, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689 (Longman, 2000).

It is a
carefully researched and compellingly written account of the social and
political world in which the early Baptists arose. Coffey frames his narrative
with a critical assessment of the historiographical assumptions that previous
historians have made in answering the question: How did England come to reverse
its policy of state-sponsored persecution in favor of civil toleration?

The first historians to provide a critical and
comprehensive answer were whigs. The term “whig
history” was coined by Herbert Butterfield in his book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It alludes to the English
Whigs, who favored the power of Parliament, over against the Tories, who preferred
the authority of the king. Whig historians narrated the history of Protestant
England as a story of gradual toleration that eventually reached its climax in
expressions of liberal democracy and constitutional republicanism.

Revisionist historians rightly argue that this
approach oversimplifies events as a teleological narrative with a predetermined
end. But just as problematic, is the fact that it transforms the voices of religious
dissenters by turning them into secular liberals. Revisionists attempt to
recapture the strangeness of early modern England by stressing the religious
intolerance of the Established Church toward Catholics and radical Puritan
sects. The revisionist critiques have debunked liberal myths, such as the stereotype
of medieval Europe as a benighted and violent society, the notion of the Enlightenment
as a purely benevolent and tolerant movement, and the caricature of John Locke as
a lone intellectual who single-handedly rescued England from the theory and
policy of state-sponsored persecution.

Coffey’s book seeks to temper the liberal optimism
with a little revisionist realism. He tells the story of the persecution of Protestant
dissenters along with Catholic martyrs creating a complicated narrative. He
portrays the 1689 Act of Toleration as a genuine turning point in history,
while at the same time not downplaying the reactions of religious intolerance.
More significantly, he displays how competing religious intolerances eventually
gave way to pluralism and democracy. But the story is neither as easy as the
liberals assume nor as inconclusive as the revisionists assert. Coffey’s
history of liberty is a muddled and complex story, yet a convincing one.

Moreover, Coffey reaches the conclusion that modern
political toleration was not the product of secular liberals, but rather
ironically was the result of dogmatic sectarians who, even under the state
policy of persecution, refused to conform. The result was a robust pluralism of
Baptists, Independents, Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Seekers,
Familists, and Catholics that unflaggingly challenged the Established Church that
preached religious uniformity and the civil powers that enforced it. This
notion that liberty is the result of passionate “fundamentalism” may strike
readers as counter-intuitive, but Coffey’s account is persuasive. For, as he demonstrates,
without religious dogmatism, there would very little pluralism to tolerate.

Thus Coffey shows that religious liberty was not
merely a “loser’s creed,” but became the public policy embraced as a political
good. To be sure, he admits, many other factors converged, contributing to the
eventual policy of civil liberty, among which were Renaissance humanism,
Enlightenment rationalism, the discovery of the New World, the printing press
and pamphleteering, urban growth, economic prosperity, and religious warfare.

But what is significant about Coffey’s book, and
what is missing from previous studies, is the fact that the modern political
order rests on a theological foundation, rather than an anthropological one. In
doing so he reframes the central problem, borrowing a line from historian John
Morrill, to ask how what began as a civil war of rival authoritarianisms became
a revolution of religious liberty. And perhaps struggling with this problem will
serve to challenge and complicate the simple assumptions we freedom-loving
Americans often make about the place of the early Baptists in this larger
story.